Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

December 17, 2018

It’s time to say good riddance to 2018 and to play #WOTY, the word-nerd’s favorite game. The score so far: Dictionary.com has chosen misinformation as its word of the year, with representation, self-made, and backlash) as runners-up; Oxford Dictionaries chose toxic (from a shortlist that included eight other words, one of them a former Fritinancy word of the week, gammon); Collins Dictionary selected single-use (runners-up: VAR, floss, and plogging); and Fresh Air language maven Geoff Nunberg picked nationalist. The Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum, an anonymous internet-based project, has been counting down the month of December with a daily WOTY; contenders so far have included thoughts and prayers, amorality, and, yes, flossing. (It’s a dance, in case you hadn’t known.) UPDATE: Mike Pope has posted his own very comprehensive list, which includes donugs, testilying, and TEDsplaining.

“An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography.” (Emblemetric)

November 16, 2018

Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting,big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.

December 22, 2017

The last linkfest of 2017! Let’s exorcise this miserable year with some amusing and edumacational links. And have yourselves a merry little Festivus.

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Drew Magary is back with the 2017 edition of his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma catalog: “More than any reindeer parable or silly children’s rhyme, it is THIS catalog and its splendidly useless items wherein you and I can discover the TRUE meaning of Christmas, which is that it delays the pain and horrors of this shit world at least until after New Year’s.”

“You listen to me, Williams-Sonoma: There will NEVER be a fondueassaince. Ever.”

December 15, 2017

With December half gone, we’re already deep into Word of the Year season. Dictionary.com has chosen “complicit”; Merriam-Webster chose “feminism”; Collins Dictionary offered “fake news.” Oxford University Press selected “Trump” as itsChildren’s Word of the Year for 2017, while Oxford Dictionaries picked youthquake, which last was popular in the 1960s, although for different reasons. (The word was coined in 1965 by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.) Cambridge Dictionary picked “populism.” On NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Geoff Nunberg made the case for “tribal” (although on Twitter, he made another suggestion); on Twitter, John Kelly nominated “bot,” and on the Oxford Dictionaries blog he rounded up an assortment of WOTYs, including, from Switzerland, harcèlement, or “harassment.” And the pseudonymous Emmet Lee Dickinson has been counting down December with a daily WOTY.

To appropriate a phrase: me too. As in the past, my choices for 2017 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 5, 2018, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public. Go!) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2017.” They don’t have to be single words, by the way: any “lexical item” qualifies, including hashtags and short phrases.

My WOTY, however, is a single word: reckoning, an old word given new relevance and significance by current events. Details below.

Here’s my full list of notable words of the year, in alphabetical order. Some links go to my original Word of the Week posts.

Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selectingfake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)

January 09, 2017

At its annual meeting, held this year in Austin, the American Dialect Society selected a two-word lexical item as its word of the year for 2016: dumpster fire. And it set a precedent by including an emoji representation of the term in its announcement of the vote.

Why dumpster fire? “As 2016 unfolded, many people latched on to dumpster fire as a colorful, evocative expression to verbalize their feelings that the year was shaping up to be a catastrophic one,” Ben Zimmer, chairman of the society's new words committee, said in the press release. “In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events.”

December 14, 2016

This post marks my eighth annual foray into word-of-the-year (WOTY) speculation. My first such summing-up, in 2009, included birther, Tea Party, and FAIL, among other lexical units. How things have changed. Or not.

As in the past, my choices for 2016 follow the guidelines of the American Dialect Society, which will choose its own WOTYs on January 6, 2017, at its annual meeting in Austin, Texas. (If you happen to be in the vicinity, the vote is open to the public, and it’s hella fun.) There are a few new ADS categories this year – political word of the year, digital (tech-related) word of the year, slang word of the year, WTF word of the year – and there’s always the possibility of even more categories being nominated from the floor. (For my own list, I’ve created three new categories: Obscenity of the Year, Import of the Year, and Spoonerism of the Year.) Nominated words don’t have to be brand new, but they do need to “show widespread usage by a large number of people in a variety of contexts and situations, and which reflect important events, people, places, ideas, or preoccupations of English-speakers in North America in 2016.”